We are here, ‘cos you were there!The Immigrant’s Anthem

Courtesy Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters

Mayank Bhatt and Gavin Barrett

“All of us are descended from migrants…None of us is a native of the place we call home. And none of us is a native to this moment in time” Mohsin Hamid

“I felt my position as a migrant being challenged. I can’t stay silent as a writer.” Suketu Mehta

y sister Sonal, who has lived in the United States since the late 1980s, sent me Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta in 2005, probably a year after it was published in the US. For a person who had lived his entire life in Bombay and had covered it fairly extensively as a journalist for nearly two decades, the idea that a New Yorker could have anything new to say about one’s hometown was entirely preposterous, if not totally insulting.

But Suketu Mehta, even while talking about everything that was familiar, was saying it differently.

As a journalist one had witnessed and reported the deathly carnage of the 1992-93 rioting up close, but Mehta brought alive the horror of the bloodbath with passages such as this:

“What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” I asked Sunil.

It was December 1996, and I was sitting in a high-rise apartment in Andheri with a group of men from the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party. They were telling me about the riots of 1992-93, that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

The two other Shiv Sena men with Sunil looked at each other. Either they didn’t trust me yet or they were not drunk enough on my cognac. “I wasn’t there. The Sena didn’t have anything to do with the rioting,” one man said.

Sunil would have none of this. He put down his glass and said, “I’ll tell you. I was there. A man on fire gets up, falls, runs for his life, falls, gets up, runs.”

He addressed me.

“You would bear to see it. It is horror. Oil drips from his body, his eyes become huge, huge, the white shows, white, white, you touch his arm like this” – he flicked his arm – “the white shows. It shows especially on the nose” – he rubbed his nose with two fingers as if scrapping off the skin – “oil drips from him, water drips from him, white, white all over.”

“Those were not days for thought,” he continued. “We five people burnt one Mussulman. At four a.m. after we heard of Radhabai Chawl, a mob assembled, the likes of which I have never seen. Ladies, gents. They picked up any weapon they could. Then we marched to the Muslim side. We met a pavwallah on the highway, on a bicycle. I knew him; he used to sell me bread every day.” Sunil held up a piece of bread from the pav bhaji he was eating. “I set him on fire. We poured petrol on him and set him on fire. All I thought was, This is a Muslim. He was shaking. He was crying. ‘I have children, I have children!’ I said, ‘When your Muslims were killing the Radhabai Chawl people, did you think of your children?’ That day we showed them what Hindu dharma is.” (Maximum City, 42)

‘Maximum City’ not only defined Bombay but also went on to become a genre for writing creatively about complexities that cities – especially cities in the developing world – evolve and how they transform their inhabitants.

Fifteen years later, Suketu Mehta has published another path breaking book. ‘This is Our Land – An immigrant’s manifesto’. He has obviously written it in anger, desperation and frustration at the rapid transformation of the manner in which immigrants and immigration are being treated globally.

The developed economies have, in unison, decided that they have had enough of the unwashed masses that obstinately keep on showing up at their borders, and that these immigrants are really not their problem, and that they might as well drown in the ocean for all they care. The world has suddenly become inhospitable for immigrants.

I’m a Canadian citizen, an immigrant in a country that is unique in its tolerance of immigrants. Fortunately, my experience as an immigrant has been without the horrors of racism and discrimination.

Let me hasten to clarify that while Canada by and large accepts the inevitability of immigrants to in its society; it still has not been able to evolve a mechanism that ensures the economic integration of the immigrant.

Yes, there is a crazy, right-wing fringe in Canada, too, that turns abusive and occasionally even violent towards newcomers or people who look different, but their numbers are few. It wouldn’t be erroneous to claim that most immigrants in Canada don’t experience the terror and horror their counterparts feel in some parts of Europe and the United States.

Mehta’s book while authentically portraying the conditions immigrants face in the developed world, especially in the United States and western Europe, also analyses the causes of immigration. He says it is the fear of the immigrant that is more dangerous than the immigrants themselves. He cautions that if anything perennial economic subjugation (economic colonialism) and climate change will ensure more immigration than the world is prepared to accept or even understand.

Mehta was in Toronto on two occasions recently promoting his book. In September, he participated in the maiden Toronto edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival and in October he was here to participate in the Toronto International Festival of Authors.

Meenakshi Alimchandani, litterateur and literary curator, had organised Mehta’s session at the Toronto International Festival of Literature, and agreed to my suggestion to interview Mehta after the session.

My friend Gavin Barrett, a poet and founder of the immensely successful Tartan Turban Secret Reading Series (for which he also unjustifiably credits me) agreed to my suggestion that we chat with Mehta together, giving our Bombay connection.

Mehta wanted to have “something Indian” so we went to the Indian Roti House across the Harbourfront Centre. It turned out to be a rather modest desi restaurant, that served roti wraps in extra spicy chickpeas gravy.

Gavin and Suketu discovered they had common friends and that eased the conversation. What follows below is excerpts of an interview that traversed both Maximum City and This is Our Land.

Suketu and Mayank posing in Toronto.

Mayank: Maximum City – there is no book written on a city like Maximum City. It is the first of its kind. And I don’t think there have been many that have followed that were as ambitious.

Suketu: About once a month, I get a request to write a blurb for a book that is the Maximum City of Johannesburg, or the Maximum City about Beijing. There have been some books similar to Maximum City. But to me Maximum City evolved into the book that it became. When I began, I had no idea what I was doing. It was part memoir, part travelogue, part investigative journalism. And it was my first book. I began with an idea – that I wanted to go home. I was a Bombay boy who had been abroad long enough, and I wanted to go home. I wanted my children to have a sense of what home meant to me and to them.

But that home turned out to be very different from what I thought it was. So, I just followed my nose and wherever I found an interesting story I just followed it. When the book came out, no one had any expectations of it. I remember the editor of The Times of India’s Bombay edition, asking me, “Why would the Knopf reader be interested in a book about Bombay?” And I said, “You live here, and you don’t understand why?” I met Murli Deora, who was this long-time Member of Parliament. I met him at a party at the US Consulate, and he asked me, “How long will you take to write the book?” At that time, I was being optimistic, and said, “a couple of years.” And he responded, “Couple of years? Bapana paisa bahu vadhi gayachhe? Chhamahin ma patavi do.” (Couple of years? Does your father have a lot of money? Complete the book in six months).

Nobody had any clue what I was doing. One of the gangsters who I had interviewed, asked me, “Book likh rahe ho? PhD thesis jaisa book?” (You’re writing a book, just like a PhD thesis?)

But it was a big book. It took me seven years.

I wanted my book to reach more than a certain kind of audience. My book is widely pirated on the streets of Bombay. So, once while I was in Bombay, this kid came up to me at the traffic lights carrying a stack of books and on the top was Maximum City. And he is shouting, “Chalo le lo, Maximum City, Maximum City…”

Gavin: That’s probably the ultimate compliment – to be sold a pirated version of your own book on Bombay on the streets of Bombay.

Suketu: I asked the boy, “Kitne ka hai?” (How much is it for?” And he replied, “Panso rupiya.” (Five hundred rupees). I tried to bargain with him and said, “Panso ruipya? Tere ko malum hai yeh kitab maine likhe hai?” (Five hundred rupees! Do you know, I have written this book?) Without losing momentum, the boy replied, “Thekhai, agar apne likhe hai to charso rupiya de do.” (OK, if you have written it, then pay me four hundred rupees).

I called my publisher and told him, “David, fire your sales force and hire this kid.”

Mayank: I don’t know whether Gavin has introduced himself, but his book of poems is being published next year.

Suketu: Congratulations!

Gavin: Thank you. I have a story about this involving Ranjit (Hoskote) and Nissim Ezekiel. I don’t know whether you know Nissim.

Suketu: Oh, I know Nissim. I’d meet him at the Theosophical Society at Churchgate.

Gavin: Yes, me too.

Suketu: And then, he would take me to the Udupi across the street, and then when I put in the tip, he would, with his boney hands, push back some coins to me, muttering, “too much, too much.”

Gavin: My goodness! You have a Nissim story. I can’t believe it. So, the story I have is that Nissim was to publish me when I was young, as part of Rupa’s Young Poets series, which I believe now doesn’t exist because they went bankrupt. They published Ranjit and two other poets. They were to publish 14 poets in that series. And that was the end of it. Now, I am an old poet, and some of the same work is being published now in 2020. Jerry, I think, was among that group, too. Do you know Jerry? Jerry Pinto?

Suketu: Maybe a little too well.

Gavin reading to the birds.

Gavin: I was a member of the Bombay Poetry Circle. I was there at its very first meeting. Ranjit was there, I was there, so was Anju Makhija, and a couple of others, George Oommen, and Nissim was also my professor when I was doing my MA at Bombay University. He was wise, witty, gentle, all-in-all a remarkable man.

Mayank: Suketu. You have written a book on immigration, and you call it a manifesto. You are very angry with the situation and you want the world to know that the entire debate around immigration has been wrongly construed. But immigration is not a new phenomenon. Opposition and resistance to immigration is also not new. Why now?

Suketu: There is a global backlash against immigration. There is this new populism against immigration and immigrants. Around the turn of the century, it seemed like globalisation had won the day. It was supposed to be end of history and we could all go wherever we wanted to go. Tom Friedman wrote in the New York Times that no two countries that have a McDonalds ever fought a war against each other. But then Russia and Ukraine went to war. There was a kind of backlash against this kind of global invasion and around the same time, more people started moving than ever before.

I felt my position as a migrant being challenged. I can’t stay silent as a writer.

Mayank: Immigration is relatively new in the West. But that is not the case in India. Indians have immigrated to Africa, to Fiji, to the Southeast Asia and other parts of the world long before the process of formal immigration began in the west.

Suketu: Immigration is also not new to the West. Every single western country has witnessed mass migration. We have been taught that Europe is where nationalism was born:where geographical boundaries defined national identities. We were told to be like the British and the French. They were all united. But then it turned out that the French had their separatists, so did the Spanish and the English and all the rest of them.

The notion that we have one identity – that we are Indian, or Canadian, or American is hogwash.

Mayank: Let me rephrase the question slightly. Would it be correct to state that the West has an issue with non-white immigration. The problem then is not immigration. It’s racism.

Suketu: It is both. In the 1920s America had alien exclusion acts which excluded Chinese immigrants. Non-white immigrants, particularly Asians, have traditionally faced difficulties in North America – both in America and in Canada. Australia had an only white immigration policy.

That has changed. Now, we are seen as good immigrants. Everyone wants Indians and Chinese because they are nice techies and doctors and they don’t make trouble. We are the ideal immigrants.

What is new is that the anti-immigrant prejudice is global. I recently went to India and gave a speech at the India Today Conclave. It’s gone viral, it has a quarter million views and counting. They thought I will talk about global migration, and I began with that, but then I turned my attention to the NRC; it is horrific what India is doing. The NRC is basically an anti-Muslim policy.

We have seen that kind of a situation in Bombay with the Shiv Sena. I had known Bal Thackeray and interviewed him. I wrote in the New York Times comparing Trump to Bal Thackeray, and how both are gifted story tellers. Remember Thackeray’s Dushera rally?

Gavin: I wonder about Brexit. “The worst own goal in British history.” That is the example of anti-immigration not only having a race element but also anti other Europeans. The Poles have a strong presence in Britain, and the Brits and the people in the countryside don’t want Polish people around them. This is a backlash of white against whites.

Suketu: Yes, in Britain absolutely. Yes, they don’t want Romanians, they don’t want Poles. They want to retreat into old England. All the sins of colonialism are being visited upon them, and it stems from an incredibly stupid fear of migrants. This fear is doing more damage to country after country. All the goals of the fascists are re-emerging – Hungary, Poland, Austria, Germany are being driven by fear of migrants.

And the fact is that this fear is based on illusion and an unwillingness to understand their realities. These societies are not producing enough babies and people there are growing old. They need young people to work and pay their pensions, and as they aren’t making enough of their own babies, they need to import.

They will be screwed without migrants. Look at Japan. It is stagnating under 4 percent because they have kept migrants out, and now they are desperate.

Gavin: This is so interesting because I am a real mongrel. My mother is from East Africa, my father is Anglo-Indian, and we almost moved to Japan in the 1970s when my dad was in the merchant navy. He wanted us to live there because he loved the place, but we were not allowed to live there. I have a question –apart from India and US are there are other flash points that we should be watching with even more fear and caution because the world’s eyes are not on them. As Indians abroad, we are always watching India, and the world watches the US.

Suketu: I don’t think that the focus on India is adequate. The subject of my talk in India was that Indian Muslims are being systematically being ‘otherised’ which I have never seen in my life. The situation is changing. When I was in Bombay last, a Muslim man came up to me and told me about his predicament. He went to Cathedral School. He went to Stanford. He came back and joined a private equity firm. He is part of the elite of Bombay. It is just that he is a Muslim. He has always been glad that he is an Indian and not a Pakistani.

After Mr. Modi gets re-elected, this man’s Hindu friends tell him not to worry in case the private equity market tanks, “Aap kyun fikr karte hain? Aap ka toh ek tang Pakistan mein hain! (Why should you worry about market collapse. Your other leg is in Pakistan).

To say such a thing to a person like that is unimaginable. He was truly shocked. He has never felt like this in his entire life. He is around 50. Even during the riots, he didn’t feel like this. He realised that there was a fringe that was indulging in rioting. Now, the rot is throughout the Indian society.

I for one am truly scared about the Indian situation. What we are witnessing is a change in basic humanity and values. My grandfather had a jewelry shop in Calcutta. He was a member of the RSS. But when a Muslim man ran into his shop, he protected him and told the mob that chased him to his shop that he would shoot all of them if they so much as even touched him. That man was now his guest and it was his obligation to protect him. Such values are fast disappearing from India, I think.

Among this generation there is no knowledge of this past because history is so badly taught. There is an absence of intimate knowledge of the other. My grandfather, despite his RSS allegiance was deeply appreciative of the Persian language, which, he said, was the purest of languages.

Mayank: Also, there is mainstreaming of the fringe globally. The fringe of two decades ago is now centerstage. That is probably responsible for what is happening to the Muslims in India. But there is no ‘other’ in the US. Immigrants are an amorphous group, with no easily identifiable ethnic group emerging as a target group.

Suketu: I have more hope for the United States at the moment than I have for India because in the US just about one-third will vote for Trump, but in India, a majority of Indians are convinced that Modi is a strong man. He has been able to create a seductive narrative around beating Pakistan, which Indians are loving.

Gavin: Ingeniously, Modi has succeeded in fanning anti-Muslim sentiments even among other minorities in India. I known there are some within the Christian community who now openly express anti-Muslim sentiments and they love Modi. But they don’t realise there is nothing for them.

Suketu: That’s right. After the Muslims are done with, they will go after Christians and Parsis and other communities. In America you go after Mexicans, the gays and women are next.

Mayank: You ended your talk (at the Toronto International Festival of Authors) by emphasizing there is hope. Where do you see hope?

Suketu: In the US certainly. Demographically, the country is going to turn majority non-white. People who support Trump are on their last gasp. They are practically screwed. The Republican Party will be obsolete in about a decade.

Demographically, they are alienating huge sections of the population. I mean look at Texas – the entire state of Texas is about to go Democratic because it is becoming very, very multicultural. Houston is more diverse than New York. Houston has the country’s biggest Pakistani community, Vietnamese, and they are now voting.

But, more than politics, what climate change will do to migration, the world has no coordinated response. The shit’s going to get real. Nearly a billion people globally are going to be displaced by climate change.

Gavin: Obviously, the only option is going north, and the global north will have to be prepared mentally to take a lot more immigrants than today.

Mayank: Your book is from a specific western perspective. Would the arguments still remain relevant in India where immigration – legal but mostly otherwise – of Bangladeshis remains a constant factor.

Suketu: Actually, that is a myth. I have analysed the numbers and there are a fewer Bangladeshis coming into India now than a decade ago. It’s the narrative of invasion of immigrants that catches the imagination of the masses. There aren’t that many Bangladeshis in India. India is a large country and it can easily take in many more Bangladeshis.

Mayank: Paradoxically, even sane, rational citizens of India, who are not necessarily enamoured by the Hindutva propaganda, and who make wise economic decisions about their lives, resist the influx of immigrants from within India, especially from northern states and Bangladeshis.

Suketu: These are the same people who will at the first opportunity come to America and Canada and protest loudly against discrimination.

Gavin: And all of them are Modi supporters. When Modi came here, I was protesting outside the venue with placards.

Suketu: Good for you.

Gavin: Every other Indian was in the stadium.

Suketu: It is the hypocrisy that is mind-numbing.

Gavin: There is another factor – immigrants get in, and then they want the door shut behind them.

Mayank: How would you compare the situation between Canada and the US. We just had an election and the Liberal Party has returned to power with truncated numbers, but the important point is that in the Greater Toronto Area, voters preferred a racial mix.

To the credit of the Conservative Party of Canada, even their candidates in GTA comprised diverse racial background.

Suketu: When it comes to immigration, Canada is a rare success. It wants to triple its intake of immigrants. The system is very immigrant friendly. They have done the whole immigration thing intelligently by not letting one ethnic group dominate. So, when things turn for worse, there isn’t a particular group to target.

You have the Bengali Canadian Consul General in Silicon Valley going around telling everyone, “Listen, America doesn’t want you, but Canada does. Move to Canada.” America is actually shooting itself in the foot. America is telling immigrants, “Don’t come, don’t come. You’re taking away American jobs. They’re actually creating American jobs.”

Gavin: I have my own experience to share. I’m an immigrant. I have my own business and I provide employment to Canadians. The systems should be happy that we’re here. One of the major problems in settlement of new immigrants in Canada is that they find it very hard to get jobs here and they are left with little choice but to start their own businesses, and eventually they hire other people. But the political system is in favour of immigration.

Suketu: I say this in my book. In the section on Canada in my book I have said that the political system is in favour of immigration. Except perhaps the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec.

Mayank: But now we also have the People’s Party started by Maxine Bernier. But even he fielded non-white candidates in the GTA. A close friend of mine, Tahir Gora, who runs a TV channel on which I did a program a couple of years ago, was his candidate.

Suketu: That is extraordinarily ironic.

Mayank: You have called your book a manifesto, and manifestos are generally written in anger.

Suketu: Yes, we must be angry; very angry. All the immigrants, like me, who have been angry, have always had to apologise. “Thank you for letting us in. We’re going to be nice people.”

Gavin: We silence ourselves. We have so much to say, we have so much burden to carry but we silence ourselves. We have to fit in, changing our accents, not eating spicy food, eating food that doesn’t smell.

Suketu: My purpose in writing the manifesto is to give ammunition to everyone who feels aggrieved at being an immigrant. To feel affirmed and then demand change. We should have no doubts about our places in these countries as immigrants. I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post saying, “I’m an uppity immigrant. Don’t expect me to be grateful.”

My book assigns historical blame – on colonialism, on corporate colonialism, on war, on climate change, and western powers are responsible for all of these ills. My simple argument to the west is: ‘We are here because you were there, and you continue to be there.’

**********

Notes:
--Reuters pic: An Ethiopian immigrant holds her two-week old child at the Lyster Detention Centre in Hal Far, Malta April 19 2011
--The excerpt from Maximum City is from Penguin Books India 2006 edition. 





--Suketu Mehta.
Suketu Mehta is based in New York.


Mayank Bhatt is a Toronto-based author. His debut novel, Belief was published in 2016. View Bhatt's blog: www.generallyaboutbooks.com here.He is a Contributing Editor to The Beacon Webzine.
Mayank Bhatt in The Beacon:
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Gavin Barrett is co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of idea consultancy and brand advertising agency Barrett and Welsh in Toronto. Born in Bombay, his poetry has been published in Reasons for Belonging (Viking Penguin India) an anthology of 14 Indian poets, the Pen India journal, The Folio, The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad among others. He co-curates (with Mayank Bhatt), the Tartan Turban Secret Readings a series promoting BIPoC Canadian writers.
His first collection of poems will be published in spring 2020 by Mawenzi House.